MOVIE NEWS – In Argylle: The Super Spy, Henry Cavill plays the invincible hero in the title role, until it turns out that this time things aren’t quite going the way we’re used to. Director Matthew Vaughn wants to bring a new light to the genre.

“It’s partly my fault that the clichés of spy movies are so prevalent these days, because I’ve made several films in that genre,” Vaughn told Vanity Fair. – Now it’s time for the big rematch, when I’m going to collect all the familiar panels and turn the whole thing on its head.”

All we know about Argylle: The Super Spy is that it starts off as a proper spy movie, with Cavill, as he should, for example, doing an erotic dance with Dua Lipa, who plays the femme fatale, but it turns out that it’s all the work of an irrepressible writer (played by Bryce Dallas Howard) who is working on her latest novel. Then the fantasy becomes reality, and vice versa, as a mysterious spy organisation sets its sights on the writer, resenting her ability to predict what plot they are secretly plotting. How Vaughn manages to extricate himself from this subtle game remains to be seen. There will be no shortage of twists and spectacle, as Argylle: The Super Spy cost $200 million, the same as the new Napoleon opus, which features large-scale battles.

Vaughn cites two of the great heroes who inspired Argylle. One of them is the famous spy novelist Frederick Forsyth, whose books have sold 70 million copies and several of them have been made into films (The Day of the Jackal, The Odessa Affair). Forsyth was able to write such good spy novels because, as those familiar with the genre will have discovered long ago, he was himself a spy for twenty years, as he later admitted. He reported to MI6 as a war correspondent, providing sensitive information that British intelligence would otherwise have been hard pressed to obtain – first informing them of the hidden horrors of the Zambian civil war. Later in the fruitful relationship, however, the spy service censored Forsyth’s novels in a peculiar way: the author sent a draft of the work to the ‘boys’, who checked that the fiction was not so close to reality as to be damaging to the agency. According to Forsyth, over the years they had little say in what he wrote or how he wrote it, only asking for information from time to time just in case.
Vaughn’s other big favourite is the famous former James Bond, Roger Moore. “I love what he said about 007. He walks into the salon, he’s instantly recognisable because he’s the most elegant, everyone knows his name, but also what he drinks and how he drinks it. What kind of spy is that? It’s ridiculous. Well, those are the clichés we wanted to shatter in Argyle: The Super Spy.”

(Argylle – home release: 1 February 2024)